Paper Info
Title
XLBlocks: a Block-based Formula Editor for Spreadsheet Formulas
Abstract
Spreadsheets are frequently used in industry to support critical business decisions. Unfortunately, they also suffer from error-proneness, which sometimes results in costly consequences. Experiments in the field of program education have shown that programmers tend to make fewer errors and can better focus on the logic of a program if they use a block-based language instead of a textual one. We hypothesize that a block based formula editor could support spreadsheet users in a similar way. Therefore, we develop XLBlocks and conduct a think aloud study with 13 experienced spreadsheet users from industry. Participants are asked to create and edit several formulas, using our block-based language. We then ask them to evaluate this editor using the Cognitive Dimensions of Notations framework. We found that for all dimensions the block-based formula editor received a better evaluation than the default text-based formula editor.
Year
DOI
Venue
2019
10.1109/vlhcc.2019.8818748
Symposium on Visual Languages and Human Centric Computing VL HCC
Field
DocType
ISSN
Engineering drawing,Computer science,Human–computer interaction
Conference
1943-6092
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
0
0.34
0
Authors
2
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Bas Jansen1122.95
Felienne Hermans266.49